A panel discussion in New York between veteran feminist scholar Sheila Jeffreys and three of the young women behind the Pique Resilience project is worth watching all the way through
But the introduction by Lierre Keith (words as read by Natasha Chart from WOLF) is everything!
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open” wrote poet Muriel Rukeyser in 1968. We are lucky to live in a time when woman after woman has told the truth. When propelled by collective pain and inchoate rage, women found the words, saw the pattern called politics, created theory and built a movement to liberate women.
And the world did split open. A short history of feminist accomplishments rape crisis helplines, battered women’s shelters, abortion and birth control on demand, sexual harassment laws, equal funding for girls sports, the storming of the barricades in the trades and professions and the flowering of lesbian culture. We owe everything to these women.
Where there is injustice though there is always resistance, but equally resistance brings backlash, and we are now living in a time of vicious backlash.
Both the left and the right have reaffirmed their bedrock belief in the women’s naturally subordinate whether we are seen as the private property of one man or the public property of all men - as Andrea Dworkin put it. Either way it is our nature to serve men, according to men, and hence both left and right are champions of gender.
We are now being told that if you don’t like being subordinate it is not because subordination is wrong, it is not because you aren’t a woman.
Both left and right often act as if women are not real human beings. But the cage around us is very real. It is heart breaking beyond measure how much men love that cage. The only antidote I know for both that heart break and that cage was expressed by another poet Ntozake Shange “I found god in myself and I loved her, I loved her fiercely”
Sheila, the woman of WOLF, the women around the world say thank-you. Thank you for telling the truth and splitting the world open
Chiara, Helena and Jesse. First, we are sorry. What Ntozake found should have been passed on like a sacrament from the women who came before. The cage is not you. It was never you. But the transmission was broken, and women, young women especially are lost once again in that pain and inchoate rage.
Some of us have been fighting for decades, we never gave up, but it wasn’t enough, and we are sorry. And second we say welcome. Welcome here with us. We are honoured to hear you tell the truth about our lives and we stand ready to split the world open with you."